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I’ve been looking for a good way to transfer images of the hard drives on my VAX-11/730 over to my modern computers for archival and other fun. My previous attempt to bring up TCP/IP networking on the VAX was not successful, so I tried a different approach this weekend. And it worked! Well, mostly.
Now before digging into the details, let’s describe the computer in question. The VAX-11/730 was small by VAX-11 standards, but it’s still a great big beast of a machine that takes up a lot of room in my little house. It also sucks lots of power and gives off a whole lot of heat, but luckily it was a cool and breezy weekend so I could open up windows to keep the room from getting too hot. My VAX-11/730 has 3M of RAM if I recall correctly. It has a 120 megabyte model R80 fixed hard drive, and a 10 megabyte model RL02 removable-back hard drive. It also has a 1600 BPI 9-track magtape drive, model TU80. The R80 drive came with hobbyist-licensed OpenVMS 7.3 on it, with a node name of PIKE and a node ID of 1.730. The previous hobbyist owner apparently had it clustered with another VMS machine named KIRK.
